Undiscovered Umbria tour package
This short tour is dedicated to discovering the rustic beauty of this marvelous region full of cultural and natural richness waiting to be explored.
Gubbio History Guide
HOME » POPULAR ITALIAN DESTINATIONS » GUBBIO TRAVEL GUIDE » GUBBIO HISTORY GUIDE
About this guide: This guide to the history of Gubbio was written by the Italian-born travel specialists at Trips 2 Italy, a custom tour operator that has designed hand-crafted Italian vacations since 2003. Every recommendation below reflects the same first-hand knowledge our team draws on when we build a private Gubbio itinerary around a traveler’s interests, dates, and pace. Read it for your research, then let us translate it into a trip designed entirely around you.
How Did Gubbio Begin?
Gubbio is one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in Umbria, and its roots reach past Rome into the world of the ancient Umbrians, the Italic people who gave the region its name. Their settlement of Ikuvium commanded the pass routes through the Apennines and the fertile upland plain below, and by the last centuries before Christ it was a flourishing religious and civic center.
The ancient Umbrians were neighbors and rivals of the Etruscans across the Tiber, and Ikuvium grew where mountain and plain exchanged their goods: salt and flocks moving along the Apennine routes, grain and oil from the lowlands, and the sanctuaries that gave the place its authority. Long before its medieval towers, this hillside was already a place where central Italy came to worship and to trade.
What makes Gubbio’s antiquity extraordinary is that the town can still read its own oldest voice. The seven bronze Eugubine Tablets, discovered in the fifteenth century and preserved in the Palazzo dei Consoli, record the rituals of an ancient priestly brotherhood in the Umbrian language, the longest and most important such text to survive anywhere in Italy.
The tablets describe a ceremonial landscape travelers can still trace: processions around the city gates, observations of birds for omens, sacrifices for the purification of the town and its people. Standing before the bronzes and then walking the town they describe, with a guide who can connect text to territory, is one of the most remarkable historical experiences in central Italy, and we build it into every history-focused Gubbio itinerary we design.
What Do the Eugubine Tablets Actually Say?
The tablets, engraved in bronze between roughly the third and first centuries BC, are the liturgical handbook of the Atiedian Brethren, a college of priests responsible for the ritual welfare of ancient Iguvium. Five are written in the native Umbrian alphabet, derived from Etruscan, and the later ones in Latin script, capturing the very moment when the old Italic world was folding into Rome’s.
Their contents are astonishingly specific. They prescribe how to take the auspices from the flight of birds, how to purify the citizen army by driving it three times around a ritual circuit, which gods to invoke at which of the city gates, and how to pronounce the curses against neighboring peoples. For linguists, the tablets are the Rosetta stone of the Umbrian language; for historians, they are an unmatched window into the religion of pre-Roman Italy.
Tradition holds that the tablets were unearthed in 1444 near the remains of the Roman theatre, and that the town acquired them from their finder a few years later, exchanging grazing rights for what its councilors already understood to be a civic treasure. They have never left Gubbio since, and the town regards them much as a family regards its founding documents: with quiet, absolute pride.
What Was Roman Iguvium Like?
Iguvium entered Rome’s orbit in the third century BC and prospered as a municipium commanding the Via Flaminia’s mountain flank. Its most visible legacy is the theatre that still stands in the meadows just below the walls, built in the first century BC with seating for several thousand spectators, among the larger surviving theatres of its era in Italy.
The theatre was faced in the same local limestone as the later town, and enough of its arcades and cavea survive that summer audiences still take their seats there for classical drama and concerts, watching performances against the backdrop of the medieval skyline. A small antiquarium nearby gathers mosaics and finds from the Roman town, whose grid lay in the plain rather than on the slope.
Gubbio’s move up the mountain came in the troubled centuries after Rome, when security mattered more than convenience and the townspeople rebuilt on the defensible terraces where the medieval city now stands. That migration explains one of Gubbio’s distinctive pleasures: the Roman town and the medieval town do not overlap but face each other, so travelers can stand in a first century theatre and read eight further centuries of history rising up the hillside opposite.
How Did Medieval Gubbio Rise to Power?
The Middle Ages made Gubbio fierce. The town emerged as a free commune in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, fielding its own army, coining its own governance, and defending itself against ambitious neighbors, Perugia above all. In 1151, tradition records, Gubbio defeated a coalition of eleven allied cities beneath its walls, a deliverance credited to the counsel and prayers of its bishop, Ubaldo Baldassini.
Ubaldo shaped the town in life and in death. He is remembered for persuading the emperor Frederick Barbarossa to spare Gubbio, and after his death in 1160 he was canonized and carried up Monte Ingino to rest above the town he had protected. The Festa dei Ceri, run in his honor every May since, is in essence the medieval commune still giving thanks nearly nine centuries later.
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were Gubbio’s golden age. Wealth from wool, ceramics, and the mountain trade routes built the great civic ensemble that still defines the town: the hanging Piazza Grande on its vaults, the Palazzo dei Consoli begun in 1332, and the disciplined streets of gray limestone that make Gubbio one of the most complete medieval townscapes in Europe. What travelers see today is substantially the town that century built.
The commune’s world remains unusually legible. The trades that ran medieval Gubbio survive in the three teams of the Festa dei Ceri, masons, merchants, and farmers each carrying their own saint, and the great campanone in the tower of the Palazzo dei Consoli is still rung by hand on the town’s great days, by bell ringers who work beside the swinging bronze as their predecessors have for centuries. Few places let a traveler hear the Middle Ages as well as see them.
What Happened Under the Montefeltro and the Papal States?
In 1384, exhausted by factional strife, Gubbio gave itself to the Montefeltro counts of Urbino, beginning two and a half centuries under one of the most cultivated dynasties of the Renaissance. Federico da Montefeltro, the celebrated duke and patron, kept Gubbio as a favored residence and raised the Palazzo Ducale opposite the cathedral in the 1470s, wrapping a graceful Renaissance courtyard in the fabric of the medieval town.
Federico’s Gubbio palace held one of the wonders of the age: a studiolo of illusionistic inlaid woodwork, a small room whose walls seem lined with cabinets, instruments, and books rendered entirely in intarsia. The original paneling now stands reassembled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the palace in Gubbio displays the story of the room it once housed, a very Eugubine mixture of pride and loss.
The same era gave Gubbio its own painter. Ottaviano Nelli, active in the early fifteenth century, filled the town’s churches with courtly Gothic frescoes, and his Madonna del Belvedere in the church of Santa Maria Nuova remains one of the treasures of Umbrian painting, tender, jeweled, and still in the town it was made for. Seeing Nelli where he worked is one of the quiet privileges of an unhurried Gubbio itinerary.
When the della Rovere line ended in 1631, Gubbio passed with the duchy of Urbino into the Papal States, and history performed its accidental kindness: centuries of quiet followed, sparing the town the rebuilding that transformed busier places. Gubbio joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1860 with its medieval fabric essentially intact, a preservation by patience that modern travelers inherit whole.
Where Do St Francis and the Wolf Enter Gubbio's History?
Francis of Assisi knew Gubbio personally. After renouncing his father’s wealth around 1206, he walked to Gubbio, where the merchant family of the Spadalonga sheltered him and clothed him, an act of friendship the town commemorates in the church of San Francesco, raised beside the site of the family warehouse. Gubbio thus stands at the very beginning of the Franciscan story.
The legend of the wolf belongs to the same years. The Fioretti tells how Francis confronted the wolf that had been killing livestock and threatening the townspeople, tamed it with a word, and sealed a pact by which Gubbio fed the animal until its natural death. When a wolf’s skeleton was found buried near the church of San Francesco della Pace in the nineteenth century, the town received the discovery as confirmation of what it had always believed.
History and legend are not rivals here; they are the town’s two registers. The documented shelter given to a penniless saint and the story of the pacified wolf carry the same meaning, a town that chose peace, and both are told on the spots where they are set. Our guides walk travelers through the Franciscan sites in narrative order, which is how the story lands most powerfully.
Which Places Bring Gubbio's History to Life Today?
Start in the Palazzo dei Consoli, where the civic museum keeps the Eugubine Tablets along with the coins, ceramics, and paintings of the commune, and where the loggia opens onto a view that explains the town’s command of its valley. Piazza Grande itself is a document, the boldest piece of medieval civic engineering in the region, and the bell tower’s campanone still rings the town’s great occasions.
From there, history climbs and descends. The funivia rises to the Basilica of Sant’Ubaldo, where the patron saint rests above the town and the three ceri wait between festivals; the Roman theatre holds the ancient chapter in the meadows below; the Palazzo Ducale and the cathedral carry the Renaissance court; and the Franciscan churches keep the wolf and the saint. Few small towns anywhere let a traveler walk from pre-Roman bronze to Renaissance intarsia in a single unhurried day.
Sequence matters as much as selection, and it is where our specialists earn their keep. We compose Gubbio’s story chronologically where interests allow, pair travelers with historian guides chosen for their narrative gift, and fold the town into wider journeys through the region as part of our cultural tours of Italy. Three thousand years arrive as a story rather than a shuffle, and Gubbio tells it better than almost anywhere.
Ready to Begin Planning Your Gubbio Vacation?
Gubbio deserves more than a template. Since 2003, Trips 2 Italy has designed private Italian vacations one traveler at a time, hand selecting every experience based on what you tell us rather than fitting you into a predefined package. Our Italian-born team plans Gubbio with the knowledge of people who call Italy home, from the hanging Piazza Grande to the oak woods of Monte Ingino, and we remain at your side throughout your trip with 24/7 assistance. Tell us how you imagine Gubbio, and we will craft the itinerary that matches it.
Explore Our Gubbio Vacation Itineraries
Travel Guides
Frequently Asked Questions About the History of Gubbio
What are the Eugubine Tablets?
The Eugubine Tablets are seven bronze tablets engraved between roughly the third and first centuries BC with the rituals of an ancient priestly brotherhood, written in the Umbrian language. Discovered in the fifteenth century and kept in Gubbio’s Palazzo dei Consoli, they are the longest and most important text surviving in any ancient Italic language besides Latin.
How old is Gubbio?
Gubbio began as Ikuvium, a settlement of the ancient Umbrian people, and was already a flourishing religious center in the centuries before Rome absorbed it as the municipium of Iguvium. The town has been continuously inhabited for well over two thousand years, with its medieval golden age in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Who was Sant'Ubaldo?
Ubaldo Baldassini was Gubbio’s twelfth century bishop, credited with saving the town from the emperor Frederick Barbarossa and with its 1151 victory over a coalition of rival cities. Canonized after his death in 1160, he rests in the basilica atop Monte Ingino, and the Festa dei Ceri has honored him every May for more than eight centuries.
Did St Francis really come to Gubbio?
Yes. After renouncing his inheritance, Francis was sheltered in Gubbio by the Spadalonga family, and the church of San Francesco stands beside the site of their warehouse. The famous legend of Francis taming the wolf of Gubbio is set in the same years, and the town preserves the churches tied to both the history and the legend.
What is the Palazzo dei Consoli?
Begun in 1332 and attributed to Angelo da Orvieto, the Palazzo dei Consoli is the crenellated civic palace that dominates Gubbio’s skyline from Piazza Grande. It houses the civic museum with the Eugubine Tablets, and visiting it with a historian guide is the heart of any history itinerary Trips 2 Italy designs for the town.
Can I visit the Roman theatre in Gubbio?
Yes. The first century BC theatre stands in open meadows just below the medieval walls, with much of its stone seating and arcading preserved, and it hosts classical performances on summer evenings. We time visits for the late afternoon light and pair the site with the antiquarium’s mosaics and the Eugubine Tablets for a complete ancient day.